An Ode To Pop Art

1,020 flower petals later...

For my grid project, I decided to glue fake flower petals to a canvas, and paint a picture on these petals.

The first step for me was deciding what to do as my picture.  Last semester I enjoyed making my poster project, and even used the concept to create my final painting in my ART204 class, so I decided to give it another shot.  It;s something I enjoy, and I think it has turned out pretty good every time I've attempted it, so it only made sense.

To start, I took a picture of my face, because I knew I wanted to use a picture of me for this project.  The next step was easy.  Use the process I learned in ART210 with Santi and make a poster.  First, I converted the picture into black and white in Photoshop, adjusted the brightness and contrast, and used the dodge and burn tools to bring out more detail in certain areas, like my eyes and lips.  After I was finished with Photoshop,  I opened the new image in Illustrator and used the Image Trace tool to make the poster.

Next, I drew a grid on my Illustrator image, so that I would have a grid to work off of when making the real thing.

After a trip to Michael's to purchase the canvas and petals, I got to work.

My grid was required to be 30 units by 30 units, but mine ended up being 34 units by 30 units.  In my Illustrator grid, my project was originally supposed to be 34 units by 44 units, but after starting I realized that 44 petals would simply not fit down the side of my canvas without being even more on top of each other than they already were.  

While glueing the petals onto the canvas, my hot glue gun burned me more times than I would like to admit, and some not so nice words were yelled because of that.  After I finally glued all 1,020 petals onto the canvas (yes, there really is 1,020 of them), used black paint to create the image.  As you can see by my Illustrator file, I was originally going to write a quote at the bottom of the grid, but ended up liking the finished product more without it.

So, there you have it.  That is the story of my grid project.  The pictures below go in the order of the description above.

I put a lot of work into this, and hope you all like the final product as much as I do!